From data to delivery, Trinidad and Tobago’s Child Poverty Reduction Strategy will be finalised and rolled out in 2026. But this national plan is being shaped against a stark backdrop: new data has revealed the harsh realities confronting many of our nation’s children.
The sobering findings of The Multidimensional Child Poverty Analysis 2025 showed that more than one in three children in Trinidad and Tobago are multi dimensionally poor. It means they are faced with simultaneous deprivation in at least two critical areas of well being such as education, nutrition, water, sanitation, health and housing.
The study was crafted with the technical support of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), grounded in the Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) framework.
Minister of the People, Social Development and Family Services Vandana Mohit shared some alarming statistics on the most vulnerable children.
“Children living in rural communities are even more vulnerable than those in urban areas. Those in female-headed households, larger families, and households where the head has lower educational attainment face disproportionately higher risks. Boys experience slightly higher rates of deprivation than girls, and, significantly, children exposed to physical or psychological discipline also suffer greater deprivation.”
The Ministry of the People, Social Development and Family Services, in partnership with UNICEF, held a stakeholder meeting on the report, which saw Government Ministries and youth-centred organisations shedding light on the problems faced by this country’s youth.
In his presentation, UNICEF’s Global Director of AI, Social Policy and Social Protection, Gaspar Fajth, underscored the importance of human capital in a country’s development.
“The cognitive capital theory says that our skills, our capabilities, are basically established in early childhood, the younger the child, the more important it is to give the child all the inputs that the child needs.”
Minister Mohit revealed that by 2026 the Child Poverty Reduction Strategy will be finalised and embedded into this country’s planning and implementation framework.
“The Ministry of the People, Social Development and Family Services will lead this process, but child poverty is not the responsibility of any single Ministry. It requires a unified national effort, with every sector contributing meaningfully to a shared vision of equity and opportunity.”
Some of the policy recommendations in the report include the development of a sensitisation programme for new parents, the adoption of a multisectoral approach for policies aimed at children, and the promotion of social services targeting vulnerable families with children under the age of five.